Art entrepreneur Elsa Wen, who owns the private When Gallery in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, plans to promote Guangdong contemporary art at home and abroad.(Photo: Shenzhen Daily) Photo Gallery>>>

　

    BEIJING, June 12 -- Art entrepreneur Elsa Wen, who owns the private When Gallery in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, plans to promote Guangdong contemporary art at home and abroad.

    In cooperation with Art de Vivre in the Shenzhen Sculpture Academy (SZSA), Wen, 30, is staging a special exhibition in her gallery in the SZSA through June 18.

    Tilted “Maeght: Art Without Boundaries,” the exhibition includes more than 30 works by internationally acclaimed artists, such as Joan Miro of Spain, Alberto Giacometti of Switzerland, Marco Del Re of Italy, Aki Kuroda of Japan, Xavier Grau of Spain, Selma Gurbuz of Turkey, Luc Doerflinger of France, and Walasse Ting of China. All works are on loan from the Maeght Gallery, a well-known private gallery in France.

    At the conclusion of the exhibition, Wen plans to hold another exhibition for the Beijing-based female avant-garde photographer, Chen Man, who is represented by Wen’s gallery, in the SZSA at the end of June.

    “My ultimate goal is to run a professional private gallery and specialize in promoting contemporary art in oil painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video, in South China, and particularly in Guangdong Province,” Wen said in an interview Sunday.

    Wen said she was going to stage a series of exhibitions with various themes for some young, promising Guangdong-based avant-garde artists in her gallery in Shenzhen next year.

    “There are few professional galleries in South China nowadays and I’d like to blaze a trail in the art market in South China and make more people aware of contemporary Guangdong art by running a number of high quality art exhibitions,” she said.

    Based on her perception of her own clients, Wen believes two kinds of private art collectors are emerging in Guandong Province today.

    “One is the entrepreneurs who are rich, well educated, have more spiritual pursuits and believe that art collection can bring them more fortune,” Wen said.

    “And the other kind is the young people who are not very rich, but are not confined to traditional thinking and don’t spend their savings merely on apartments or private cars,” she said.

    “Only through running high quality art exhibitions will I be able to bring together the best Guangdong artists and art collectors from home and abroad and provide a platform for them to interact with each other,” she said.

    Born in Guangzhou in 1978, Wen spent four years studying at the Affiliated Middle School of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art (GAFA). She continued studying graphic design at the GAFA in 1998.

    While still in her first year in college, she started a graphic design company with her brother in Guangzhou in 1998. She remains a shareholder of the company today.

    When she graduated from the GAFA in 2002, she originally planned to pursue further studies in the United States. But after receiving three months’ training in France, she chose to go to Paris at the end of that year.

    After working part-time as a graphic designer in a publishing house in Paris for one and a half years, she decided to sit an entrance examination for Christie’s Education in Paris in September 2005.

    Founded in 1978, Christie’s Education is the educational arm of the world’s major auction house, which provides high quality education in art history, connoisseurship and the art market through hands-on experience.

    Among the 30 students from all over the world who were admitted into Christie’s Education that year, she was the only one — and also the first — from the Chinese mainland.

    After one year of intensive training and study, Wen obtained a diploma in art history from the Renaissance to the 1940’s from Christie’s college in July 2006.

    “The biggest benefit I reaped from my study at Christie’s Education was that I had cultivated a critical eye for judging a work of art,” she said.

    While studying at Christie’s, Wen visited the Louvre more than 100 times to examine various collections there.

    “At the beginning of my study, I was often required to stay and examine a work of art for at least three hours before writing a report,” she said.

    “But now it takes me only 10 minutes to judge a work of art and another 20 minutes to write a critical review on the beauty and quality of the work,” she said.

    After graduating from Christie’s Education in July 2006, Wen worked as an intern at Christie’s France, in Paris for three months and then in the Loft Gallery for one year before returning to Guangzhou in October 2007.

    “On my first day at Christie’s Education, I began to consider going back to South China and opening my own gallery here,” she said.

    With the help of her brother, her dream finally came true in Guangzhou in December 2007. And with the help of the Art de Vivre in the SZSA, she opened her gallery in Shenzhen last month.

    Wen believes the major problem facing the majority of young artists in Guangdong Province today is that they still cannot shake off the so-called academism, that is, what they have learned from their teachers in college.

    “In fact, the whole of Chinese society is rapidly progressing today, and the social and cultural problems the young generation of artists is facing in 2008 are very different from what Wang Guangyi and the three Luo Brothers (Luo Weidong, Luo Weiguo and Luo Weibing), pioneers of contemporary Chinese art, faced in the 1980s and 1990s,” she said.

    “Young artists today should exercise more freedom and become more open, creative, vigorous and dynamic in their artistic creations, and the images they present should be more diversified, and they should focus on the human psyche rather than politics in their works,” she said.

    Wen says she understands there is still a lot of work she needs to do to develop her business in Shenzhen.

    “Running art exhibitions in Shenzhen is just the starting point for my career here. I have no other choice. And if I’m not going to do it, who else will do it?” she said.

    (Source: Shenzhen Daily)